Her visit caused both positive and negative reactions.
On Oct. 4, the current Miss USA winner Alma Cooper came to The University of Tulsa with Army to take pictures and videos with students and faculty and to watch Army rip our team’s hearts out and eat them like MREs. But who is Cooper, what is a Miss USA, and why should we care that she visited TU?
Cooper is an intelligence officer of rank Second Lieutenant in the US military. Miss USA is a beauty pageant, in which women walk on stage, first in bikinis, and later in evening gowns and go through a very brief Q&A round. For those familiar with bodybuilding, imagine if the Olympia competition only had one division and the judges pretend to care about personality. Another interesting thing about the competition is that former president Donald Trump owned the Miss USA company from 1996 to 2015. Trump was recorded saying multiple questionable things about women in the past, making his ownership of a women-only competition suspect. But that is not the only issue to be taken with this competition. To get a woman’s opinion on the topic, I interviewed fellow Collegian member and certified woman Heba Saleh.
Saleh and I primarily agreed on the idea that pageants have a problematic objectification of women, especially Miss USA. Putting aside its controversial ownership, the very structure of the pageant favors ranking the women by their physical attractiveness. For instance, unlike its competitor-pageant Miss America, Miss USA has not done away with the swimsuit segment and does not have a talent segment, although it does have an interview portion. As such, much of the competitors’ successes are determined by how conventionally attractive they are and has little to nothing to do with the content of their character.
However, Saleh pointed out that, despite the archaic concept of the competition, it did serve as an opportunity for people in worse financial situations, and therefore cannot be entirely condemned as problematic. Saleh had also gone to the speech that Cooper delivered when she was here with her alma mater. Saleh said she went into the talk excited to see a fellow woman of color speak about her journey and believes that Cooper’s story was important.
The 2024 Miss USA winner was born to an immigrant mother and talked about the challenges she and her family had overcome for her to get to where she was. However, Saleh found that the talk felt very basic, saying that Cooper essentially said that, through her struggle, she got into West Point and “kept working harder and harder and harder again” to pass one of her physical aptitude tests and is “resilient in that way,” adding that while “those are all really important,” she would have preferred Cooper “delve deeper into that.” Overall, Saleh said she found the whole speech to be very “surface level.”
Later, when Cooper began fielding questions, Saleh asked Cooper what changes she believed the organization of Miss USA should make in minimizing the exploitation of the contestants. She found Cooper’s answer lacking, saying that Cooper essentially said it is on the winner of the pageant “to be more than that,” which “is really just putting the blame back on the women being exploited.” The statement, Saleh says, essentially implies that any objectification of the previous winners was “on them” as well. Saleh added that she understood that Cooper was in a difficult spot answering this question, but maintained her stance: it is not fair to place the blame held by a massive corporation onto the women it exploits.
The general criticism the pageant receives should not be something we extend to every woman who participates in them. Although such criticisms are fair in arguing that participating in a competition which objectifies women perpetuates that objectification, one cannot know the background of everyone in the pageant and many of them were likely traveling this path before they were old enough to choose whether it was for them or not. Alternatively, the pageant may have been one of limited options to escape a financial situation.
So given Cooper’s story, the exploitative nature of the pageant, and an implication it is up to the Miss USA winner to combat the stigma surrounding the pageant, should we care about her visit at all? Honestly, no. Cooper is a recent graduate of West Point and when she came to TU to cheer on her football team, the school and the Miss USA corporation made the reasonable decision to capitalize on her celebrity presence. So, despite the above, Cooper herself is not, by any indication, a controversial or morally questionable person. Her coming to campus was simply a means for the university and the Miss USA pageant to gain more publicity. So, although her presence got much coverage by the university and others, it is not truly as big of a deal as it was made out to be.